In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Mark Antony reflects on the numbing cruelties of civil war, a "domestic fury" so dreadful "that mothers shall but smile when they behold/Their infants quartered.../All pity chok'd with custom of fell deeds." Last week, it seemed, the pitilessness that has devoured so much of the former Yugoslavia since 1991 was at last choking itself toward extinction. Strife that has fed on vengeful mythologies and minor cultural differences was succumbing, among many southern Slavs, to a universality of victimhood. Around the western Balkans, sorry droves of refugees could almost have exchanged identities as they toted a few spare...